


eat, sleep, wake (nothing but you)

by akhikosanada



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, First Kiss, Fluff, Getting Together, M/M, Mutual Pining, and there was only one bed, oh my god there was only one bed, sylvix go to Lisbon for felix's birthday: the fic, what do you mean i am once again using one of my irl experiences and romanticizing it for fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-04
Updated: 2020-06-04
Packaged: 2021-03-03 19:13:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,676
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24540625
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/akhikosanada/pseuds/akhikosanada
Summary: "The only reason Felix hasn’t noticed probably is because he’s too busy analyzing every other part of the flat first. It’s very Felix, in a way; Sylvain distantly hears him opening and closing every cupboard to check for essentials (coffee, always first in Felix’s well-known list of priorities) and lesser necessities (toilet paper), drawing the curtains and letting late noon sunrays stream specks of warmth and sparkling dust into the living-room, stepping shoeless onto the balcony with the not-quite quiet of a cat.Sylvain drops both their bags along the bedroom’s bed. Singular."Sylvain takes Felix on a weekend abroad for his birthday. It's not a romantic getaway. He SWEARS it isn't.Written for Rest Day, a FE3H zine for Covid-19 relief, posted for Sylvain Week 2020 day 4 - Rest
Relationships: Felix Hugo Fraldarius/Sylvain Jose Gautier
Comments: 39
Kudos: 236
Collections: Sylvix Squad Super Stories





	eat, sleep, wake (nothing but you)

**Author's Note:**

> this fic made two of my american friends want to go to lisbon
> 
> I am so blessed to have been able to write this very, very self-indulgent fic for a good cause! It was an amazing experience to be part of rest Day, a Fire Emblem: Three Houses zine for Covid-19 relief, and I'm now so happy to share my piece with all of you!! 
> 
> Once again, I made a playlist to listen to while reading this fic: [click here and leave it running in the background!](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0MbFuGgMaafbwYmxMsG6vx)
> 
> I really hope the whole escapism of it helps you get away from all the pressure and stress we're currently feeling, so that we're all stronger facing tomorrow. I hope you'll like it!!

Very few feelings compare to the dizzying rush of liftoff.

Sylvain’s heart is spurred into beating blood through his veins at the cadence of wheels over uneven runway tar, a crooked, genuine smile spilling over his face like the fancy cocktails he forces himself to drink instead of beer during birthday parties. His breath catches in his throat and nestles in the crux of his collarbones as the plane leaves the ground, an unborn ghost of blissful laughter, and the thrill fans thunder and feathers along his spine and stomach. He doesn’t close his eyes; his gaze is transfixed on the ever-shrinking rooftops and cars, blurred into unrecognition by wisps of clouds like tattered tulle, spotting discolor over the golds and jades of the fields below until the palette blends watercolor and bleeds formless life.

A crush of fingers and a scrape of nails anchor him back onto the right plane of existence. Sylvain watches his hand and hears his heart disappear under the strength of Felix’s grip on it, on both, literal and figurative, and he’s reminded of the fact that this is Felix’s first time in a plane ever since Glenn died all these years ago. Sylvain’s gaze travels upstream, follows faint fir up his fingers and wrist where it fades under the sleeve of his coat; the look on Felix’s face when it reaches past the soft lines of his neck makes Sylvain trace the blends of white around Felix’s knuckles with his thumb.

“Shut up.” The words are said as harsh as Felix’s glare, as biting as Felix’s nails into the pulp of Sylvain’s palm.

“Wanna watch a movie?”

“Whatever.”

Sylvain lets out a huff of laughter, an unfortunate acknowledgement of softness. “You’re gonna have to let go of my hand for that,” he says, and doesn’t mean it.

The carpeted ground quakes under their feet; it makes Sylvain giddy, in part because Felix clings even tighter to him. “I thought this was supposed to be a _relaxing_ trip.”

There’s a gripe of guilt like a gunshot through Sylvain’s lungs — he’d hidden the _plane_ part of the program from him, when he’d shown up to Felix’s flat this Friday morning, coffee in his hand and travel bag on his back. Felix doesn’t own any suitcase but the ones under his eyes, so Sylvain had thrown him one of his own backpacks, had carelessly settled it over the files and papers laid on the coffee table, vestiges of another late night overworking session; _take the day off_ , Sylvain had said, not a question, _we’re leaving in ten_ , and Felix had emptied the cardboard cup as he’d filled up the bag, only stopping to ask him why — not even any other wh- interrogative, not even _what_ or _where_. Sylvain could have settled for a number of explanations — he was good at explanations, after all — could have talked about the stressed-out shake in his shoulders or about his birthday or about the long-lived, never-told yearning burning Sylvain’s chest to a crisp every passing day. _That’s what best friends do_ , Sylvain had answered instead, _isn’t it?_ , and Felix’s ponytail had shook from side to side as he’d sighed and followed Sylvain out and into the taxi.

It’s almost physically painful, to tear his hand away from Felix to fiddle with his phone, not entirely because Felix’s nails are just shy of scraping the skin clean off Sylvain’s bones. The plane shakes as it flies along a gap in the clouds, an empty pocket of atmosphere, and Sylvain sees the sea below as he feels the familiar elevator-drop of his heart down, down, down, another of his favorite sensations; he’s imagined it, sometimes, that adrenalined vacancy he’d feel were he to fall down and into the void below, wind blowing through him in the most loving caress, that literal, siren-sung _appel du vide_. There’s the taste of a laugh on his lips, an admission of thrill Felix must mistake as mockery, because his eyes narrow on the cooler side of copper and he crosses his arms over his chest, a little too far from Sylvain’s reach.

Still, when Sylvain lends him an earbud to have them watch one of the dumb romantic comedies he’d downloaded in forethought, Felix has no choice but to lean against his shoulder, and when he notices Felix is no longer shaking, Sylvain wishes he could make him again.

***

The only reason Felix hasn’t noticed probably is because he’s too busy analyzing every other part of the flat first. It’s very Felix, in a way; Sylvain distantly hears him opening and closing every cupboard to check for essentials (coffee, always first in Felix’s well-known list of priorities) and lesser necessities (toilet paper), drawing the curtains and letting late noon sunrays stream specks of warmth and sparkling dust into the living-room, stepping shoeless onto the balcony with the not-quite quiet of a cat.

Sylvain drops both their bags along the bedroom’s bed. Singular.

He looks closely at the bedframe, the cream wool-and-linen draping that dips straight down the center, and deduces that it’s comprised of two beds pushed together into a queen-size; the space between them is covered up by double-sized sheets and blankets as well as an ungodly amount of pillows, all in a gradation of teals and blues. There’s a diverse selection of fresh-feeling towels and soft-smelling soaps carefully arranged on the twin bedside tables at each side of the mattress — mattress? Mattresses? Whatever grammatical spelling helps him face this unforeseen situation — and the retro floor lamp next to the door sieves his shadow over the right side of the covers in the shuttered-off, subdued tungsten light. Felix’s voice beats crescendo in his ears along the rhythm of his footsteps, saying something about coming to see the rest of the apartment, why is Sylvain just standing there—

Sylvain listens to the exact moment Felix notices and his braincells connect the dots, to the melody of his mouth snapping shut over the words.

“I’m sure they must have single sheets in the dresser,” Sylvain says in a pretense of nonchalance as he sits on the edge of the bed — beds? — and stretches the uncomfort out of his arms in tremors. “The ad did say ‘one or two beds’, so it’s kinda my fault.”

“Why would it be your fault?” Felix bites, rhetorical. Sylvain knows he’s a clause away from rolling his eyes. “They probably just assumed we were…”

Felix lets the sentence fall apart unfinished as he lets his gaze fall from Sylvain’s face to the floor in an intense analysis of the fluffy woolen rug. Felix doesn’t blush much, anymore, hasn’t truly blushed since he was thirteen; Sylvain wonders if he can picture peach in the dusk his eyelashes feather over his cheekbones, imagines what shape his mouth would have taken if he’d spoken the words. _Together. Boyfriends. A couple._ _Going out._ He finds each instance prettier than the last.

Sylvain’s voice is a brush louder than a whisper when he speaks, through the false laziness he infuses in his smile. “Does it bother you?” He doesn’t know if he’s asking about the beds or about the prospect.

Felix’s eyes snap back to his, the lines on his face carved into hieroglyphs Sylvain fails to interpret even with decades of study. There’s something akin to appraisal, in the golden gleam the lamp shines onto his irises, and a darkened coffee hue Sylvain cannot quite place.

“We’ll figure it out later,” Felix says, brisk, when he turns around and steps out of the room. “I’m hungry.”

_Me too_ , Sylvain thinks.

***

They end up climbing so many stairs when they try looking for a restaurant at four in the afternoon that even Felix, athletic as he’s always been, struggles to breathe; Sylvain finds a sweet kind of innocuous revenge in the way Felix is too short on oxygen to tell Sylvain he’s _too weak_ or _should exercise more_ like he did thirty minutes before, when they walked up the first flight on the way to the flat. The stone steps that lead to the upper parts of town are ruthless on Sylvain’s thighs and even harsher on his smoker lungs, but it’s Felix who gives up first and ducks into the first open joint they spot.

It’s a vegan place. Fortunately, Sylvain isn’t too out of breath to laugh his ass off.

Felix still decides to order a burger and a bottle of craft beer, perfectly content watching Sylvain eat some avocado-and-hummus toast until he almost cuts off Sylvain’s fingers when they wander towards his French fries, looking only a bit scarier than some of the feral-adjacent tomcats they’ve seen lounging onto the paved streets and the concrete edge of open windows. It’s quiet in a manner Sylvain rarely finds comfortable: the murmur of the local radio colors the laughing conversations of the cooks in the open kitchen, broken solely by the occasional purr of an adventurous car driving by in the too-narrow alley the door stays open on; the restaurant is deserted, at this time of day, so their sparse sentences are only interspersed by the clattering of cutlery and the scrape of bread over porcelain, Felix’s reluctant half-smiles at Sylvain’s hard-trying jokes noisier than anything else in view. They train their Portuguese pronunciation over the sweeping of their credit cards into the reader when they’re finished, _o adeusinho_ corrected into _tchau_ by the good-natured chortles of the waiter, _obrigado_ repeated ad nauseum on the way down when Felix fails to roll the r each time he tries to imitate Sylvain’s practically-perfect phonetics.

_It’s not fair_ , Felix says with a scowl. _You only know three words anyway_ , Felix says with a scoff. _You’ve always been good with tongues_ , Felix says with a smirk. On the way down, too, Sylvain struggles to breathe.

The air is warm enough for Sylvain to remove his jacket before they even reach the supermarket inside the metro station, the estuary breeze blessedly cool over his skin, and he wonders how Felix isn’t boiling hot underneath his casual turtleneck sweater, until Felix mumbles something about climate change and Sylvain answers that they’re just very much to the South for the mere sake of arguing — it works, to Sylvain’s gleeful regret, because Felix launches into a rant about European February weather until Sylvain shushes him by handing him a shopping basket once they’re under the cool shield of the brick station roof and through the automatic doors.

“There’s not enough coffee, right?”

Felix’s fingers brush his when he takes the handle. “There’s never enough coffee.”

They grab two packs, for good measure, even though they’re here for three days and two mornings; Felix insists they still have breakfast at the flat because they both know damn well Sylvain’s the one who’s going to cook it, so they drop in a pack of bacon Felix won’t have the chance to burn, some butter, and soft, doughy bread loafs. Sylvain forces eggs into Felix’s indelicate fingers hoping he doesn’t drop them too hard on the cashier belt, grabs a bunch of bananas in a charade of healthiness as though they’re not gonna eat a full meal again in a few hours, gets a bottle of cold orange juice out of the fridge he’s half-tempted to make into cocktails. He and Felix fight like they’re a decade younger for the right to pay, the way they used to when they grabbed drinks after classes at the kebab-shop-slash-convenience-store on the other side of their high school street, kicking each other in the shins and pulling on one another’s shirts. Sylvain wins, because of course he does, and Felix angrily dumps the groceries into the bag the nonplussed cashier hands him, the crinkle of plastic a perfect accompaniment to Sylvain’s bright, Portuguese _card, please_ — Sylvain half-chases Felix back to the apartment when he leaves Sylvain alone in the shop and flees with their bounty, probably looking like half a madman as he runs up the hilly streets and laughs at the realization that _he_ ’s the one with the keys.

They go out again a little after nine, after they’ve both settled their clothes in a semblance of tidiness and Felix has had time to chide Sylvain into not buying cigarettes a dozen times, amongst other, vacationey things, like drinking the wine bottle the host has left them on the balcony and making a list of places to visit and eateries to try out. It’s colder in the exact way Sylvain likes best, remnants of spring weather like comforting gossamer over the bare skin of his arms, which means Felix is half-shivering; he’s forgotten his coat at the flat, and the thin material of his sweater isn’t quite anyone’s classic definition of warm, so he lets Sylvain hand him his own jacket after three-and-a-half refusals. Sylvain observes Felix from the corner of his eye the way he observes the scenery around him, ready to take out his phone and analog camera to shoot impromptu candids. Felix looks… good, in Sylvain’s jacket, and there’s no other word for it; Sylvain doesn’t allow any other word for it, doesn’t allow himself to flip through the thesaurus in his mind to search for all the stronger synonyms and bad metaphors he could come up with at the sight of tan leather reshaping Felix’s shoulders bigger, of strands of hair escaping the confines of Felix’s loose bun to stream zephyr and tempest around his face at each sway and step. Felix raises an eyebrow when he sees him staring, and Sylvain runs away like he always does, steps forward with Felix’s afterimage in his mind instead of in his field of view, points at a higher-end looking restaurant and pushes the door open before Felix can say anything.

It’s a pizzeria — of course they’d be the only two people going to a foreign country and eating yet another country’s food. The clink of wine glasses and the smell of charred dough paves the way to the table one of the waiters shows them to, and they sit face to face near the bar and the brick oven; the nearby heat makes Felix undress in the worst way, the one that makes him drop Sylvain’s jacket over his seat, and Sylvain swallows his disappointment as he orders a jar of sangria to share, just to pretend they’re still playing by the rules and customs.

“Are you French?” the waiter asks in their mother tongue, heavily accented but otherwise perfect, and it makes Sylvain smile. It’s a welcome difference from the usual “Are you Sylvain Gautier?” that follows his every apparition outside of his neighborhood and usual time-wasting, drink-filling spots.

“We are,” and it’s Felix who answers, surprisingly, probably to prove Sylvain the dumb point that he still has a slight accent when he half-talks a foreign language. He’s certainly right — there have been moments where Sylvain has been that petty — but this is Felix’s birthday weekend, these are Felix’s rest days, and Sylvain doesn’t put up a fight. In any case, the answer launches them both into a quarter-French, quarter-Portuguese, half-English-and-hand-movements discussion, and Sylvain soon joins them into discussing the city, the right places to see, the wrong things to eat, the amoral bottles to drink. The waiter supplies them both with full glasses of cherry liqueur — _on the house_ , he says in English and with a wink, and that’s when Sylvain understands he’s the owner of the restaurant — along with each plate he slides over the ivory tablecloth, big and small, until both of them are fuller of _ginjinha_ than of food. Sylvain still orders goat milk ice cream, for he’s now well-versed in the ways of self-hatred, and Felix’s snort of disgust turns into a curious stare when Sylvain lets out an appreciative noise.

“Want a taste?” Sylvain says, force of habit and fate-sealing, a spoonful of ice cream threatening to melt over his fingers.

Felix doesn’t answer, which is less concerning than the fact that he does not do anything else; his coffee-strong, copper-melted gaze is dulled with drunkenness, hazy-edged and summer-sunned, and Sylvain is about to tell him he’s joking when Felix’s elbows dig into the fabric around their glasses and he leans in. His fingers are calloused where they brush the inside of Sylvain’s wrist, pulse-soft, and bring Sylvain’s hand to his face, cherry-red tongue and pale-peach lips closing around the mouthful as his eyelashes flutter down.

It’s nothing short of a religious experience, and when Felix’s eyes open again and a hint of ice cream is left on his lower lip, Sylvain wants to sin.

They split the bill, this time, because Felix is too liquor-high and Sylvain too love-drunk to fight; the way back is uneventful as could be when one tiptoes the edge of tipsiness into full-blown inebriation, Sylvain’s jacket back in Sylvain’s arms now that Felix’s blood has been heated by alcohol. They carefully step down the steeper streets after Sylvain tripped on loose cobble and sent Felix in a five-minute-long guffaw — it’s not a miracle, exactly, for Felix to laugh out loud in this unrestrained, unrefined way, but considering Felix has been brought up to hate his own laughter and self-taught into repressing the slightest hint of mirth, it’s pretty damn close. It sparks fire inside Sylvain’s veins, lets a stricken match fall to arson over the cherry rush of spirits, and he leaves the atmosphere quietened into cooling midnight blue. Felix slides the key into the lock, takes three tries to unlock it before the door to the flat tumbles open, undoes his hair as Sylvain carelessly throws his jacket over a chair.

It comes back to him when Sylvain enters the bedroom again, Felix following closely until they stop in the doorway.

“I’d forgotten about that,” Sylvain says; his hand unconsciously rakes into his hair as it tends to when he’s anxious, when he’s expectant. “Wanna help me separate the beds?”

“It’s eleven-thirty,” Felix immediately answers, and when Sylvain’s eyes turn to his Felix is staring straight at him. There’s that _café noir_ expression again, too complex for Sylvain to analyze unless he has a proper taste. “I’m too tired. I… don’t mind, really.” Felix’s gaze drifts down, follows the bridge of Sylvain’s nose, stops a little lower.

“Yeah.” Felix is right. It’s eleven-thirty. Sylvain is somehow still hungry. “Good. Me neither.” There’s a lock of hair falling like a shadow across Felix’s eyes, longer than his bangs, telltale of looseness, and Sylvain wants to push it back behind his shoulder and run his fingers through the rest of the strands. It reminds him of simpler times, too, of youthful summers and teenage winter; Felix must not have had time to cut his hair in months. “It’ll be fun,” Sylvain says, giddy with reminiscence. “Do you remember? Just like when we were kids.”

Felix’s expression shuts off as he stiffens.

“ _Kids_. Right,” he mutters, and his tone says wrong.

Sylvain raises an eyebrow. “Fe?”

“I’m gonna take a shower. You’re drunk. Go to sleep.” The words are machine-gunned in the same way he pushes Sylvain out of the way, grabs a random towel, and steps out to the bathroom, the slam of the door like a slap to the face.

Sylvain lies on his back when Felix comes back; the t-shirt he wears is too warm to be worn under the covers, but he keeps it on if only because Felix does as well, damp hair fluming down his shoulders in the darkness of the bedroom and the artificial light of Sylvain’s cellphone as he puts up an alarm. He doesn’t say a word as he slips underneath the blankets, just lays on his side, his back turned to Sylvain, and Sylvain catches the clean smell of lavender and baby powder when droplets of soaped water bleed into the pillows as Felix gets his hair out of the way.

“Night,” Felix still says, more to the wall than to Sylvain. It’s a saving grace, really — Sylvain doesn’t know if he could do anything else than kiss him goodnight were Felix to face him properly.

“Sweet dreams.” Sylvain falls asleep to the scent of home.

***

The smell of coffee percolates through his freshly-washed hair when Sylvain steps into the living-room, chases water out of the locks and onto the floorboards as it drifts along the morning breeze. Felix is at the small garden table on the balcony, half-basks in sunspots like a lazy cat, a cup resting against his lips; Sylvain says nothing as he crosses the doorway, only drops a plate of _pasteis de nata_ on the decrepit teal paint. The weather is still comfortably warmer than what he’s used to, his fingers pushing back his hair to better enjoy the cool drops falling along the back of his neck, and Felix mimics the motion by pushing a mug towards him. When Sylvain looks at him, Felix averts his eyes to the street below, though there’s nothing to see there.

They share breakfast in the silence of distant conversations and the song of the wind, too familiar to be uncomfortable; Felix has never been a good conversationalist, especially in the mornings, and Sylvain quiets every sentence he would normally fill up the space with around mouthfuls of _pastel_. It’s absolutely heavenly, which means it’s sweet in a way Felix probably loathes, but there’s a kick of cinnamon in the custard that should satisfy him still. Once Sylvain is certain Felix won’t spit the pastry out and in his face, he pulls out a folded piece of paper from the front pocket of his chino to slide it across the table.

“Happy birthday.” It’s the first words he’s said to him since they went to sleep.

Felix looks at him, this time, stares into Sylvain’s eyes with a glint of annoyance tinted in disbelief, but there’s the rise of an eyebrow and the ripple of a breath over the coffee surface, so Sylvain knows he’s forgiven for whatever he did or said to make Felix mad the night before. When Felix lays down his cup and unfolds the paper, Sylvain catches how his eyes widen from umber to amber, how his mouth quirks into the ghost of a sincere smile.

“Concert tickets?”

“Sorry, I’d have bought you another sword for your collection, but I’m afraid they’re forbidden on planes.”

Felix snorts. Sylvain softens. “So your birthday gift isn’t this whole trip?”

That, somehow, catches him off guard; he’d figured Felix would mention how they were tickets for his favorite band and one of Sylvain’s most-loved ones, how it was their only show in the whole country this year, how they’d once danced drunk over their songs at 2am in the faded refrigerator light of Sylvain’s first flat. He hadn’t imagined Felix would ask him about the trip itself; was Felix that oblivious to his own tiredness? “It… wasn’t intended as a birthday trip, really.”

Felix doesn’t blink as he looks back at him, his voice an octave lower. “What did you intend to do, then?”

The perplexity Sylvain feels must show on his face sharp as daybreak, because Felix starts speaking again. “Let me get this straight. You asked me to go with you. On a trip abroad.”

Sylvain nods.

“The weekend of my birthday.”

Sylvain hums.

“ _Alone_.”

Sylvain swallows. Hard.

Felix’s eyes narrow to burnished again. “Just to give me concert tickets that you could’ve given me back home?”

Sylvain sees it as though from the window on the other side of the street — his fingers playing with the handle of his mug, turning it one way and another over the weather-beaten table, his foot tapping the ground, rhythmless, to the beating of his own heart. “I mean, you needed the rest. You’ve been exhausted, lately. I haven’t seen you in weeks.”

“So it’s _just_ that?” Felix’s voice is louder, now; if Sylvain listens closely, he can daydream through the skepticism a hushed-up hint of hope. “All of this, that you did. It’s just because I’m _tired_? The only thing you wanted to say was ‘happy birthday’? There’s really nothing else?”

Felix stares into Sylvain’s eyes as though there’s supposed to be more to it — and there is, of course there is; _I believe there will be a city for every important event that will happen in my life_ , Annette had said to him when they were discussing which place to choose for the trip, _moving-in propositions, marriage proposals, first kisses, too_. Sylvain had chosen Lisbon because, according to Annette, it was everything but a city designed for major events. There’s a particular place in the world where Sylvain would prefer these things to happen; he has fantasized the possibility too many times not to know, though a possibility is everything that it will ever remain. Still, Lisbon is the kind of city where he could see himself saying more than needs to be said, so he keeps his mouth shut, lets resignation carve wounds into the lines of his forehead, counts the copper sparks of understanding until they add up to a conclusion. There’s a sunstorm gradation in Felix’s eyes, like he’s reading all the footnotes on the pages of Sylvain’s heart, and Sylvain waits for the other shoe to drop. The silence is torturous, now.

It’s only broken by Felix’s sigh and the scrape of a chair against the balcony stones. “I guess not, then. Nevermind.”

Sylvain, like every time he doesn’t know what to say, speaks. “Fe, I—”

“It’s okay. I shouldn’t have asked.” Felix’s voice is lighter as it disappears into the kitchen. “Let’s go visit the town, today.”

***

The bubblegum pink of the pavement under their feet reminds Sylvain of Hilda’s hair on her drunkest nights, scotch-sticky, soot-stricken. People sloshing side to side like the drinks in their hands block the way to oncoming cars and fill up the warm evening air with songs and discussions in a dozen languages; the red dot on Sylvain’s phone map leads them to an old, fancy building, its hallway door open over Pink Street beehiving locals and tourists alike, and Sylvain holds Felix’s wrist through the crowd as they weave in-between groups to make their way inside.

“Do you think we’ll find someplace to sit?” Felix asks; he has to speak louder than he usually does, his voice tenor as he wills the words to reach Sylvain’s ears.

“I hope we do,” Sylvain answers over a laugh. “My feet are killing me.”

Felix says nothing in rebuttal or ridicule, which is how Sylvain knows he’s in the same sorry state; they’d spent the entire day out, the city much more beautiful and photograph-prone than what Annette had led him to believe, and what should have been a quiet stroll had devolved into a day-long promenade where they stopped only to buy stupid souvenirs for their friends — each of them would now be the proud owner of a penis-shaped, ceramic fridge magnet —, eat at a taqueria where Felix had spent the whole hour-and-a-half making fun of Sylvain’s supposedly weak tastebuds, and drink good coffee in an expensive hipster shop like there weren’t plenty of those in their hometown already. The wooden stairs creak under their steps as they climb up to the first floor, the stairway walls painted and graphed all over in colorful letters and pictures, and Sylvain realizes the apartments have all been repurposed into cocktail bars: customers travel in-between floors through the doorless doorways, drinks in hand, sitting on the stairs or along tables in the hallways when there is no room in the actual flats. The queue is long enough on the second floor that they can snicker like teenagers when they admire the museum-like display of sex toys and other lewd accessories along the far-side wall, Felix loudly wondering in French what it is with this town and its fascination with dicks, until four people turn to him with a snicker and they’re reminded that the city is a privileged tourist destination.

The drinks are good, the prices are worse; Sylvain pays for both his sweet gin-and-syrup cocktail aptly named _Strawberry Slut_ and Felix’s slightly fancier imitation of whiskey-and-coke while Felix looks for a table, and their unfruitful quest for a place to settle leads them to the mostly empty studio-sized room across the hall. There are distorting, blurry mirrors all over the ceiling, and Felix immediately sits on the round velvet couch in the very middle of the room until they both realize there is a steel vertical pole reaching the ceiling in the center of the sofa and what look like bathrooms at the far-end.

“This is the weirdest fucking bar I’ve ever been to,” Felix says, and Sylvain laughs so hard as he sits next to him that he almost chokes on his drink.

They sip their cocktails in relative quiet. The sound of music and ambient, nonsensical conversations barely reaches them as they scroll through the pictures Sylvain has taken that day to post them on social media — colorful tiled buildings and homes give way to flights of stone steps going down, drying clothes flying along windows move on to ornate architecture and bronze statues, still-lifes of wandering tourists cohabitate with plates of food and coffee cups. Sylvain’s glass is empty when he’s finished with his updates and thumbs through his profile.

“We haven’t taken a selfie yet.” He feels Felix scoff more than he hears him; he’s closer than he was before. Sylvain turns to him, and their shoulders brush. “I know, I know, you hate it when people take pictures of you.”

Felix leaves his glass on the hardwood floor around the couch, still looking at Sylvain like he wants him to choke. “It’s vain. I don’t see the appeal.”

“See, this is why no one appreciates your looks. They can’t even _see_ them.” Sylvain stretches his arms over his head as he lets himself fall on the plush velvet of the sofa. It smells a little like sweat and too many disgusting people, but when he looks up into the mirror-ceiling, the blur of Felix’s reflection watches him. “Hey, what if we took a selfie here? In the mirror? I don’t think anyone will recognize you, and I’ll get the selfie I want. Best of both worlds.”

Sylvain expects many things, at that — an insult, a kick in the knees, Felix standing up and leaving. He doesn’t expect Felix to fall down next to him, defiant in his docility as he tells him to _get on with it already_ , and so Sylvain lets his head lull close against Felix’s as he raises his phone and shoots their fuzzy reflections, one, twice, thrice. Footsteps echo through the cushions, and Sylvain imagines the stares, his daily, everyday-life occurrences. If they’re lucky, people will think they’re drunk; if they’re luckier, people won’t care at all.

“Do you want another drink?”

Felix is quiet as his finger glides onto the screen in Sylvain’s hand. If Sylvain were to turn his head to properly look at him, his lips would brush against Felix’s cheek. “No,” Felix ends up saying, “let’s go home,” and since Felix makes no move to leave, Sylvain stands up first, offering him his hand.

They take the seaside-long way home, the same one they’d walked along of at sundown, where the skyline reds and golds blended through their eyes until all Sylvain could see was Felix’s _contrejour_ ; Sylvain fills up the night air with silly songs, intentionally messes up the lyrics because he knows Felix listens to them too and won’t resist the urge to correct him, and when he’s proven right and Felix spits out a meaningless insult he laughs and laughs and laughs. He continues until Felix sings along with him, out of stubborn, misplaced pedantry over pop song knowledge, tries to one-up Sylvain in tone and volume even though he’s off-key in the exact, subtle way it infuriates Sylvain, but Sylvain finds out he doesn’t care, not when Felix sings of love while staring straight at him, and he doesn’t even feel the thirty-minute-walk back.

Felix has the keys, this time, too. The key slides into the lock, more practiced than the night before; when they walk in, Sylvain closes the door, leans against it as he removes one of his shoes.

“Can I ask you something?”

Sylvain looks up to Felix standing in front of him, too close yet not enough, the few centimeters like an abyss between them. Sylvain tries to read the coffee grounds at the bottom of his gaze, fails to divine his immediate future from the patterns he can decipher. “Shoot.”

Felix takes a breath like a leap of faith. “Yesterday, I think you wanted to kiss me.”

Sylvain inhales so sharply he fears his heart will burst from the sudden pressure.

“And you didn’t.”

Sylvain licks his lips and watches Felix’s eyes follow the motion as though glancing down at subtitles. “I should have,” he answers, small and strangled.

Felix hums. “You have three seconds to correct that mistake.”

Sylvain curls hopeless fingers into the softness of Felix’s hair and kisses him.

The turmoil inside his mind subsides at the gentle press of Felix’s mouth against his, melting like candlewax under a silver seal, the letters of his heart undisclosed over Felix’s lips in the sweetest imprisonment. Felix singes relief into him through hot sighs and soft bites, soothes circles with his thumb along Sylvain’s jawline as though he could blur Sylvain’s broken edges with his own, as though Sylvain could not cut him open in the process, as though it would not matter at all if he did anyway. Sylvain watches the haze of smoky topaz coloring Felix’s gaze bleed warm in the space between them as he pulls back, carves his fingerprints into Felix’s waist when he draws Felix in again, hums deliverance and desperation and devotion against Felix’s tongue until Felix shudders.

The other shoe drops. And another, and another one, and Felix pulls them into the bedroom and doesn’t bother closing the door.

***

On the castle battlements, Felix takes Sylvain’s breath away in place of the lusterless view.

He does it in small touches, sprinkled over the visit like confectioners’ sugar, delicate and ingenuous: a kiss as they look down over the bay and the sea, infused with blues and greens and sun; another as Sylvain waits for him up the stairs to the half-crumbled castle towers, that keeps Sylvain on his toes even as Felix himself stands up on the tips of them; one yet again as Sylvain takes picture over monochrome picture of Felix against any and all present scenery, the camera almost dropping to the ground when Felix slaps his arm away to pull him by the edge of his jacket and make him pay closer attention to the better parts of his face.

This one, Sylvain makes last — or perhaps Felix does, and Sylvain is just pulled into the storm’s eye, the earth semi-spinning around them when he closes his eyes to let himself feel the weight of the world against his lips and his tongue. Felix kisses him like it’s familiar, like it’s dream-practiced; it makes Sylvain curl his fingers around Felix’s waist and pull him against his chest as though chasing the lingering taste of a daybreak reverie. Felix’s kisses, Sylvain finds out, are the flavor of long-gone days and years to come and homesickness, punctuated between parentheses until they leave in the evening to travel back to bittersweet normalcy. They taste like obscured morning light and the soap that flumed along Felix’s hair when they’d showered together, filling up Sylvain’s lungs like the smell of breakfast and the shivers along Felix’s spine. There’s a Portuguese word for the way they fall into each other, for the way Sylvain misses him even as he holds him tight, lost in translation through their unspoken bond.

“You know, usually _castle_ implies _swords_ and _weapons_ , not just piles of rocks.” Felix says.

Sylvain feels his smirk soften into something sweeter. “Is that why you keep kissing me? Because I’m the best, most dashing thing in view?”

Felix rolls his eyes as he huffs and leaves Sylvain on the battlements to make his way down the stone stairs, and Sylvain lets his laughter get lost to the winds.

His hand finds Felix’s when he catches up to him, innocuous like a tangling of hair. They walk along the dirt paths to the rest of the gardens, where dozens of peacocks sing and terrify tourists into giving them bits of pastries on the castle café terrace; Felix holds no love for the birds — _they remind me of you a lot_ , he’d said earlier, which is how Sylvain knows — so when he hears Felix’s sudden intake of breath and Felix’s pull on his hand, he follows Felix’s gaze and the point of his finger to another part of the garden.

“Cats,” Felix states. There’s a decade of history between them that allows Sylvain to understand the undercurrent of excitement in his tone.

“Cats,” Sylvain confirms, and he drags Felix to the bushes where the three castle cats are hiding.

The ginger one looks up at them through lazy yellow eyes like they’re the most uninteresting thing it’s seen all day, but lets itself be petted easily enough; Sylvain looks at the backhand brush of Felix’s fingers drawing paintstrokes over the fur, the cat leaning into the touch when Felix scratches between his ears. Felix always was a cat person, even when they’d been kids and neighbors, even when Felix was all crocodile tears and helpless determination and broken-toothy smiles. He’s been forced to crouch when Felix did, their hands still tangled together; he calculates the number of kilometers they’ve come in units of time along their grown fingers, in the spaces he’s conquered between the two of them. He wonders how many steps they still have to go together, a dozen or a billion or anything in-between, walking in the same direction until the road forks and Sylvain is pulled apart. There’s a peacock feather on the grass next to one of the cats, and Sylvain holds it like a pen to write their pages with, ink invisible to everyone but them.

“Fe?”

“Mmh?”

Sylvain slides the feather into Felix’s bunned-up hair, threads it along his ear, and when he leans in to leave a chaste kiss on Felix’s lips it tickles his face.

The feather flutters to the ground. Felix’s laughter is light as air.

Sylvain pulls them up to their feet. “Let’s go eat lunch before we leave.”

“Coffee, too,” Felix answers.

***

“Wanna finish the movie?” Felix asks when they’ve settled down; he’s in the window seat, this time, with that privileged view of the world below, the one they leave behind and the one they come back to, everywhere and nowhere all at once.

“I love you.” Sylvain cannot process in what language he says it, if any at all; perhaps suffices the universal prose of a thumb grazing Felix’s knuckles, of gold-and-copper eyes closing over a kiss. Felix’s eyes widen to sunset gold. “I’ve loved you for a long time,” he goes on as he looks to the people trickling into the plane, putting bags and suitcases into overhead trunks, laughing and arguing and saying nothing at all. His hand finds Felix’s, the drumming of his heart like a one-way street for his words to beat onto. “I don’t want this to be just a lucky interlude.”

There’s an announcement over the speakers Sylvain has heard too many times to care about, flight crew moving about with instructions and demonstrations, and Felix is only looking at him. “Yeah,” Felix finally speaks, the syllable striking thunder through his hand where Felix holds it tighter when the plane shakes. “Me neither. It won’t be.” There’s nervousness and anticipation in Felix’s eyes as he sees the runway stretching under them. “Also, I love you too. Just so you know.”

Very few feelings compare to the dizzying rush of liftoff. This one does.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so so much for reading, and please leave a comment if you liked it!! i'm complete shit at answering, but it truly warms my heart so much <3
> 
> Title song is Eat, Sleep, Wake (Nothing But You) by Bombay Bicycle Club.


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